Adultery Doesn't Pay

THE SLEEPLESS MOON (375 pp.)--H. E. Bates--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($4).

The main question raised by British Novelist Herbert Ernest Bates is: How long can a writer go on being promising without paying off? In Bates's case, the answer seems to be indefinitely. Now 50, he had more fine short stories to his credit in his thirties than most good writers turn out in a lifetime. But short stories do not pay well, and Bates, like any sensible fictioneer, wants to be paid as well as read. So novels it was, and promising though several of them were, his admirers usually laid them down at the end quite sure that things would go better next time.

Like just about everything Bates has written, The Sleepless Moon is well carpentered, easily written, and well calculated to shorten a train ride or add pleasure to a tall drink. In a small English town, Constance is married to the town grocer, a man so respectable, correct and dull that passion has no chance. His comfortable household runs like a metronome, but his bed has a built-in deepfreeze. Not only does the virginal Constance wait in vain on her wedding night, she waits in vain, period.

Even in staid English provincial circles, nature has a way of filling marital vacuums. Frankie, the goodlooking young piano player at the local cinema, is just brash enough to make a pass at Constance, even though Melford is by now sure to become the next mayor of the town. A kiss on a snowy night, and Constance is done for. Soon she and Frankie are meeting in alleys, in old mills and, come spring, splashing idyllically in secret pools. Melford, no different from other husbands in a like fix, is naturally the last to know. What is more, he does not care. Then a tasty dish at a nearby tavern supplies for Melford what Melford apparently wanted all along, but Constance never knew how to offer.

Always expert at the often harder task of ending a short story, Novelist Bates seems not to know how to get out of the double mess he has contrived, and put The Sleepless Moon to sleep. But in the last extremity, there is a classic way out for all novelists in a jam, and Bates uses it. The tavern wench dies of an abortion, and unhappy Melford is let off his hook. Frankie runs out on Constance, but she is still hooked in the heart, and pitches herself from the church tower. What this trite tale of love and death is intended to light up hardly matters. But women may wonder what Novelist Bates means by letting the men off so easily: Melford ends up with a comfortable widower's life, Frankie comes back to town to cad about with not one, but several, fluttery innocents. It's a man's world.

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